A Modest Proposal Satirical Analysis

Jonathan Swift’s satirical political essay A Modest Proposal, published in 1729, addresses the issue of Ireland’s current economic plight, by addressing the various internal and external, social and individual, causes that have engendered it, by means of relying upon satire. In particular, on the one hand, Swift presents Ireland’s economic quagmire as deriving from its own “self-destructive tendencies” (Sherman 2431), specifically the individual character of the Irish people, as well as its social institutions, especially the Church. Also, on the other hand, he attributes the country’s stagnated domestic economy to external sources, namely England, in the form of absentee landlords, which is a socioeconomic issue that implicates power inequalities

His titular so-called “modest proposal” is in fact cannibalism, namely that the Irish economy can grow within all social sectors discussed above by means of eating “infants’ flesh” (2433), or bringing it “to the market” (2435). The satirical technique employed here are juxtaposition and hyperbole, as the title pronouncing the proposal propounded in the piece as “Modest”, as well as Swift’s own proclamation regarding his “humble” proposal that he hopes, naturally, “will not be liable to the least objection” (2432), is juxtaposed next to the utter irrationality of the absurd nature of the actual hyperbolic proposal. The tonal fashion in which he segues from his sarcastic yet also human and poignant lamentation of his country’s “melancholy” state (2431) and his seeming righteous indignation for some Irish mother’s “savage and inhuman” resort to murder their “poor innocent” “bastard children” through abortion due to their inability to support them in their indigence (2431), into stylistically casually stating that “a young healthy child” is “at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food” (2432), is of course jarringly irrational and ironic. This preposterous proposal is of course utilized by Swift as a means to circuitously draw the reader’s attention to the sole rational proposal for Ireland’s economic plight, which is to cure “the expensiveness” of the Irish’s “pride, vanity, idleness”, to teach the English landlords “to have at least one degree of mercy toward their tenants”, and to use products only of domestic “growth and manufacture” (2436). Swift emphatically repeats that he will tolerate “no man talk to me [him] of other expedients” (2435, 2436), such as the one above, which he indirectly characterizes as being “vain, idle, visionary thoughts”, while referring to his own proposed cannibalism as